Monday, December 15, 2014

San Francisco, CA (USA) -- Mindfulness has become
mainstream. Hospitals and prisons offer "Mindfulness-Based Stress
Reduction," public schools teach students to put their "MindUP," and
Google trains employees to "Search Inside Yourself."

Right mindfulness is the seventh aspect of the eightfold path of
Buddhist awakening. Implicit in "secularized" mindfulness is the
assumption that meditating on one's breath or present-moment bodily
sensations, while cultivating non-judgmental awareness of passing
thoughts and emotions, trains the mind to perceive experiences -- and
even the notion of a "self" -- as transient. This alleviates suffering
by detaching the mind from pursuing desires or avoiding displeasures.
Recognizing that every apparently unique "self" is really part of the
same universal process of becoming develops moral and ethical virtues
such as compassion and generosity. Ultimately, this process leads to
freedom from the effects of karma and the cycle of death and rebirth,
and entrance into a transcendent state of enlightenment or nirvana.Promoters of "secular" mindfulness avoid using the loaded words
"Buddhism" or "religion," and may even steer clear of mentioning
"spirituality" or "meditation." But the practice is essentially similar
to that taught in many Buddhist basics classes. And the hope, expressed
by certain key leaders in the secular mindfulness movement, is that
introductory classes alleviate suffering for all practitioners, while providing at
least some of them with a doorway into deeper, explicitly Buddhist
meditation.The most influential advocate for mindfulness in America is Jon
Kabat-Zinn, a professor of medicine who learned mindfulness from
Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. While on a spiritual
retreat at the Insight Meditation Society in 1979, Kabat-Zinn had a
flash of insight to "take the heart of something as meaningful, as
sacred if you will, as Buddha-dharma and bring it into the world in a
way that doesn't dilute, profane or distort it, but at the same time is
not locked into a culturally and tradition-bound framework that would
make it absolutely impenetrable to the vast majority of people." During a
1990 meeting, the Dalai Lama himself approved Kabat-Zinn's strategy of
modifying vocabulary in order to make mindfulness acceptable to
non-Buddhists.

Kabat-Zinn developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR, classes, at his Stress Reduction Clinic and Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health
Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.
Kabat-Zinn's goal, as described in his 1990 book Full Catastrophe
Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and
Illness, was to make the "path of mindfulness accessible to mainstream
Americans so that it would not feel Buddhist or mystical so much as
sensible." Insisting that "you don't have to be a Buddhist to practice"
mindfulness, Kabat-Zinn nevertheless urges MBSR graduates to find an
ongoing meditation group such as an Insight Meditation Society, an
organization that Kabat-Zinn describes as having "a slightly Buddhist
orientation."Jenny Wilks, a teacher of both explicitly Buddhist and secular
mindfulness who received training from Kabat-Zinn, explains in a 2014
article for Insight Journal that "key Dharma teachings and practices are
implicit" in secular mindfulness classes. Rather than "diluting the
Dharma," Wilks sees "secular mindfulness" as "highly accessible Dharma,"
a "distillation" of the "essence" of the Buddha's key teachings,
repackaged to "make strong medicine palatable." Wilks notes that some
participants in secular classes "do later go on to access Buddhist
classes," and reports that Buddhist retreat centers have "seen an
increase in the numbers of people coming on retreats and many of them
have started with a secular eight-week course."Like Wilks, Trudy Goodman, founder of Insight LA, in California,
received training in secular mindfulness from Kabat-Zinn. Goodman
describes her understanding of secular mindfulness as "Stealth Buddhism"
in a 2014 podcast interview with Vincent Horn of Buddhist Geeks.com:

Goodman: I really wanted us to be able to work in this community
to go into hospitals, and universities, and schools, and places where as
Buddhists we might not be so welcome, especially state places, which is
appropriate since we have the separation of church and state ... The
really interesting question is what do they do after they take that
class ... And you know the reality is they aren't that different from
our Buddhist classes. They just use a different vocabulary ... And the
question of will people then sort of migrate into Buddhism. Some will,
some won't .... anyone who practices sincerely, whether they want it or
not, they are going to discover more deeply other dimensions of their
being, I think it's inevitable if they keep practicing, don't you?Horn: That seems to be somewhat independent of whether one is
trained in a Buddhist context, or in a new, non-Buddhist Buddhist
context. [laughter]Goodman: My former husband George, he used to call it crypto-Buddhism, stealth Buddhism we now might say. [more laughter]Horn: Absolutely.

Some Buddhists affirm a "stealth Buddhist" approach to mainstreaming
mindfulness as exemplifying the Buddhist virtue of "skillful" speech.
Other Buddhists caution that skillful speech should always be truthful
-- that if even silence may deceive, then one must speak the whole
truth; exceptions apply only to those who have already reached such a
degree of awakening that they are free of self-interest and seek only to
alleviate suffering. Yet, proprietary, trademarked mindfulness programs
hint that secular mindfulness may be implicated in the self-interested
American commercial, self-help market.